IUID Blog

Earlier this week the Senate Armed Services Committee released its Report on Counterfeit Electronic Parts.  Various news items have since carried the sobering facts that counterfeit electronic parts from China are “flooding” into U.S. military systems, risking the performance and reliability of critical defense systems.  

Committee Chairman Senator Carl Levin, D-Mich., launched the year-long investigation along with the committee’s Ranking Member Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Levin is quoted as saying, “Our report outlines how this flood of counterfeit parts, overwhelmingly from China, threatens national security, the safety of our troops and American jobs.” 

Senator McCain says, “Our committee’s report makes it abundantly clear that vulnerabilities throughout the defense supply chain allow counterfeit electronic parts to infiltrate critical U.S. military systems, risking our security and the lives of the men and women who protect it.”

IUID enables track and trace capability, a key building block to solving the counterfeit dilemma.  IUID’s machine readable code generates high quality data exchange throughout the supply chain. Furthermore, global serialized item identification, the very foundation of IUID, enables traceability and visibility into patterns of distribution that relate to origin, maintenance activity, and other lifecycle events for analysis across the value chain.  With that data, remedial action is immediately available.  

When teamed with a trust network of suppliers, IUID is a proven methodology that is available today to solve the troubling and growing counterfeit problem.  (Read More)

The UID Forum in Atlanta was small by some conference standards, but the level of knowledge by those in attendance continues to grow at an impressive rate. There was an unmistakable urgency expressed by attendees who know that IUID is far more than another DoD mandate. Since I first blogged about smartphones and Auto ID in November 2010, they have gained momentum in everyday use. One reason for this is that they connect us to the “grid” in a valuable yet personal way. (Read More)

The long awaited GAO report on IUID was published late last week. From my viewpoint, as a commercial provider, the GAO has honed in on areas that require considerable DoD attention. To summarize, these include the following: (Read More)

A2B hosted a well-attended Executive Breakfast during the Forum. At that meeting I drew a parallel between two waves of bar code, the older UPC and the newer IUID. The former undeniably revolutionized the grocery and general retail supply chain by enabling tighter inventory control, instant price look-up, automatic product resupply, product batch and lot traceability, efficient item return processing and last but not least, in excess of billions of dollars in cost savings annually. (Read More)